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Thursday, March 4, 2010

PUB Sharing

One of the bigger concerns in renting a flat in Singapore is the sharing of PUB bills. There are a lot of assumptions and differing interpretations as to how PUB should be shared among tenants.

Here are some things to consider:

- PUB = utilities. As long as you are using water, electricity and gas, you should pay.

- infant or children also use utilities (directly or indirectly), and sometimes they even have more usage than adults specially if they are staying in the house most of the day

- aircon vs non-aircon rooms. Of course, aircon rooms use more electricity, but as to how much, we cannot really have an accurate measurement. With this in mind, it is obvious that those who occupy a non-aircon room should pay less as compared to those staying in aircon rooms. Unless they compensate this with higher usage of other utilities.

Based on considerations stated above here are suggestions on how PUB bills should be shared accordingly:
1) VARIABLE monthly PUB bills
- total bill divided by number of tenants (this I think is the best way to go) assuming all have the same aircon or non-airson rooms

- children can be counted as 1 adult or half the share of an adult (depending on what you have agreed upon)

2) FIXED PUB - This means that once you have agreed to rent a room or bedspace, the amount of PUB you need to pay monthly is fixed - whether the monthly bill is high or low it doesn't affect you anymore. This is good if you are charged at the average rate. But if the charge is a bit higher than average, of course, it would be a bit unfair.

At the end of the day, we really cannot accurately compute for each individual consumption of utilities. We can only make close estimates. A few cents or dollars shouldn't destroy the relationship of tenants. Problems of complaints due to unfair PUB sharing can be avoided if everyone is clear as to how and why the sharing was done as such.